Here’s some classic boards:

• Corne by Foostan
• Sofle by Josef Adamcik
• Nijuni by krikun98
• Sweep (based on the Ferris) by David Barr
• Cantor by Diego Palacios
• LMN-3 (a DAW in a box) by Fundamental Frequency

You are going to want to download KiCad. It’s a free, open-source electronics design suite, and a huge percentage of people that make PCBs online use it. Take the project from the repo of your choice. Draw or select your image. You need something that pops visually in black and white, so a high-contrast image or something with really nice patterns. Usually, I try to dither and resize my images in something like Photoshop before bringing them into my project, that way the silkscreen isn’t too complicated and doesn’t need to be resized in KiCad.

Now that you have your image, open KiCad and select the “Image Converter” on the right-hand side. From there, you are going to want to select “load bitmap” and load whatever image you wanna print on your PCB. You are going to need to take into account the maximum DPI that your PCB manufacturer can handle (300 dpi is usually a good rule of thumb). For me, this process is always a lot of trial and error, but don’t get frustrated if the program crashes.

You can make liberal use of the various tabs to see how the image is going to look in black and white and invert the image if it does not work with your silkscreen. Most of the time, you are going to be working with a white silkscreen, unless you are working with white FR4 in which case the silk will be black, so keep that in mind when establishing the negative space on your art. You can even up the contrast in KiCad to make the file a little more legible. When it looks good, you can save it to KiCad’s footprint library. You can always come back here if the silkscreen isn’t perfect when you drop it on your board, and you probably will.

Load up your project. In this case, I am going to go with the Cantor, a wonderful PCB to start with for a number of reasons: it uses very cheap STM32 “blackpill” controllers that cost next to nothing on AliExpress, it doesn’t use hot-swap sockets so you can see your art clearly, and it doesn’t require a case which reduces the number of parts you need to order or make. 

Once your PCB is loaded up, you are going to press “O” or click the “load footprint” button on the right-hand side of the toolbar. This brings up all the “footprints” in your library, which includes any silkscreens you may have previously generated. You can use the filter up top to quickly narrow down your choices to the art you just generated. If your silkscreen is too big or small for the area you have selected, refine it in one of the previous steps and try again. If you see something that looks like “G***,” double click your silkscreen and select properties, then untick “visible” to make that part of the footprint invisible. The layers you are going to be editing on are usually called “F.Silkscreen” and “B.Silkscreen” for front and back, respectively. If you want the silkscreen on the other layer, press “F,” and it will flip the silk to the other side of the board. This is handy if you want an image on both sides of a board. Place your silk on a relatively clean and empty part of the board or get creative — it’s design! To preview how the board is going to look, you can open up the 3D viewer in KiCad and rotate your board around.